Ever wished you could listen to Christmas music any time of the year you want, but don’t want to lug out your CDs? Why not just go to the computer, make a couple of clicks and you can be listening to all the Christmas music you can handle for free.
Pandora is a popular streaming music service in the United States that works off of the “music genome project”. The idea is you tell the service a favorite band or song, it builds a “channel” from that, plays you a sample to see if you agree it has chosen a good example, and then will play you similar music by other performers. You can vote “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on songs so you can continue to customize the channel to your likings. The service is free for up to 40 hours a month with advertising, or for $3 a month you get unlimited streaming and the ads are removed.
Just this week the site launched a new area of over 100 “genre channels”. These are pre-built channels that you can customize as time goes on, but they attempt to get you a jumping on point to various musical styles. Once you go to Pandora.com/genres, and click on “Holidays”, you will find ten Christmas-themed channels for you to choose from. These include:
- Christmas
- Classical Christmas
- Peaceful Holidays
- R&B/Pop Holiday
- Country Christmas
- Swingin’ Christmas
- Rockin’ Holidays
- Jazz Holidays
- Christmas Blues
- Folk Holidays
You can of course build your own channels also, but these will give you a great jumping off point, and even if you don’t customize them at all, they will get you in the Christmas mood in a hurry any time of the year you want.
